The New York Times recently published an article by Matthew Desmond, Why Poverty Persists in America, adapted from his new book, Poverty, by America. I spent a decade as a lawyer for poor people – as a storefront lawyer and manager in St. Louis and New York City and then running a clinic in West Virginia. I could have personally verified almost everything in Desmond’s article. What I couldn’t do is describe how to break the cycle of poverty. As Desmond explains, almost every benefit we try to give to people who need it is scooped up by others – landlords, banks, check cashing services and other businesses claiming the poor are so unreliable they have to charge exorbitant rates they wouldn’t charge you or me, but they claim the poor will benefit anyway. It sounds like it “makes sense” but it’s nonsense. As Desmond documents, many who serve the poor have much higher profit margins, so their cries of distress are little more than crocodile tears.
The problem I have is how to deal with all this. There are so many issues. Society instinctively jumps to solutions that victimize the vulnerable and make it impossible for them to pull themselves out of poverty. All this backfires on the rest of us because we see areas of concentrated poverty as dangerous.
Bail reform is an example – a seemingly unrelated policy decision that undermines what we try to do. Locking people away while waiting for a court hearing thwarts their efforts climb out of poverty – by the time they reach a judge, they’ve lost their jobs, any savings, often their families, and their employability when they get out. Keeping people in jail without a conviction is horrible public policy – it lets prosecutors get innocent people to sign confessions for things they didn’t do because the damage of staying in jail is so much more, allowing DAs to become petty tyrants.
As long as people are kept in jail pending trial, the cop’s words are conclusive. Everyone, cops included, makes mistakes. By the time of trial, those mistakes have already ruined many lives. Similarly, people’s lives have already been ruined while waiting in jail for trial where police act out of prejudice or bad motives. The legal system is supposed to supply checks and balances but keeping people in jail pending trial eliminates them all and makes some police into petty tyrants. Plus, by enlarging the group of desperate people, it lowers everybody’s wages.
But bail is only a piece of the problem. Much more than bail, financial, housing or antitrust reform are necessary. Assuming so many bad things about the poor, people routinely lump extra burdens on them. As Desmond explained, “Poverty isn’t simply the condition of not having enough money …. It’s the condition of not having enough choice and being taken advantage of because of that.” That’s why all paths lead to corporate doors and why Republicans would rather blame the poor than their corporate clients for what goes wrong.
So, as Desmond explains, it takes a movement. It takes people who see the problems to their roots with all the interconnections and are committed to dealing with them root and branch. When you hear Republicans saying that Nancy Pelosi, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are too extreme or all the other seemingly bad names they have for them, understand they’re saying any regulation of their wealthy contributors is too much for Republicans. That’s what’s really “extreme” and unworthy.
Steve Gottlieb’s latest book is Unfit for Democracy: The Roberts Court and The Breakdown of American Politics. He is the Jay and Ruth Caplan Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Albany Law School, served on the New York Civil Liberties Union board, on the New York Advisory Committee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, and as a US Peace Corps Volunteer in Iran.
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